Forget the deaths from natural disasters, the spread of infectious diseases, heat stress, forced migrations, and the rampant civil unrest and wars coming down the road. The impact of unchecked, man-made global warming on the planet’s food supply is just another way climate change is going to kill people over the next three decades:
The effects of climate change on food production around the world could lead to more than 500,000 deaths by the year 2050, according to a grim new study. Climate-related impacts on agriculture could lead to an overall global decline in food availability, the research suggests, forcing people to eat fewer fruits and vegetables and less meat. And the public health impacts of these changes could be severe.
The average American understands the immediacy of climate change only when the sun beating down on his or her shoulders seems unusually harsh, only when a February that should be plunged in freezing temperatures suddenly yields a week of balmy, near-tropical conditions, only when the news reports have trouble distinguishing the latest hurricane’s wreckage and flooding in any given New Jersey or North Carolina beach town from the one that happened just two years ago. We know something seems terribly wrong, and then it passes, the media gaze averts and we forget all about it until it happens again. And we forget the fact that only a decade or so ago when we were younger these wild weather fluctuations never happened at all. We accept this “new normal” and get on with earning our paychecks and planning our retirements. And sometimes we notice the price of our groceries spiking because they can’t grow oranges in California or it costs too much to feed the cows in Texas.
But for a good segment of the Earth’s population, the impact of climate disturbance on agricultural production is actually a matter of life and death:
The food-related deaths would be caused by two major factors: people not getting the right type of nutrition, and people simply being underweight. The majority of all the predicted deaths were found to be caused by the nutrition factors..
Scientists have fairly assumed that climate change, and in particular increased flooding, drought and the disruption of normal growing seasons around the globe would soon wreak havoc on the world’s food supply. This latest study, published in The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, is unique because it takes the extra step in examining how compulsory changes in food consumption caused by agricultural (livestock and crops) shifts resulting from climate change will affect human mortality. The researchers, from Oxford University’s Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food , combined an agricultural model with a human health model to gauge the effects of climate change on human death rates. They assumed a two degree rise in the Earth’s temperature by 2050 (a severe but increasingly likely scenario) and calculated how this would affect the availability—or non-availability—of essential food groups necessary to sustain populations in 155 regions throughout the world:
The model projects that by 2050, climate change will lead to per-person reductions of 3·2% (SD 0·4%) in global food availability, 4·0% (0·7%) in fruit and vegetable consumption, and 0·7% (0·1%) in red meat consumption. These changes will be associated with 529 000 climate-related deaths worldwide (95% CI 314 000–736 000), representing a 28% (95% CI 26–33) reduction in the number of deaths that would be avoided because of changes in dietary and weight-related risk factors between 2010 and 2050
When people don’t eat the proper amounts of fruits, vegetables and meat (protein), and when they become unhealthy, malnourished or lose weight because of lack of proper food, they tend to die—from such things such as heart disease, stroke cancer, and other non-infectious diseases:
These dietary changes translate into hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. If there were no climate change, the health model found that the projected future increases in global food availability would actually save nearly 2 million lives in 2050 compared with conditions in 2010. But the model predicted that the effects of climate change will reduce the number of lives saved by about 28 percent — this translates into about 529,000 deaths that would not have occurred if there were no climate change.
As Time Magazine (reporting on the same study) explains, people are twice as likely to die from climate-related poor diets than from undernutrition:
“It’s not just about getting enough calories,” says Richard Choularton of the United Nations World Food Program, who was not affiliated with the research. “Calories aren’t good enough without micronutrients. Cognitive and physical development depend on eating the right things.”
Many people—actually tens of millions of people in lower and even medium-income populations in all regions across the globe—are not going to have the option of “eating right” because they’re too poor to access the ”right” types of foods and because global warming is going to slowly kill off those crops and livestock that they would normally rely on to survive. So, unless things change, and unless the world’s governments get together and cooperate on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the study suggests at least half a million men, women and children will perish for this reason alone.
The researchers conclude with the following recommendations:
“Strengthening of public health programmes aimed at preventing and treating diet and weight-related risk factors could be a suitable climate change adaptation strategy with a goal of reducing climate-related health effects,” the authors write, noting that such interventions should be tailored by region to account for the specific challenges that different parts of the world are expected to face.
The climate talks held in Paris late last year represented the last and best attempts by the community of nations to agree on a framework for reducing the greenhouse emissions responsible for climate change. Those talks have now been thrown into disarray by a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court that recently stalled President Obama's plan to rein in greenhouse pollution caused by American industry. That action alone has, in turn, cast considerable doubt in the eyes of the world as to our willingness or ability to lead in confronting the threat posed by climate change.
Meanwhile, one of our two political parties has completely excised any discussion or acknowledgment of climate change from public discussion. The leading Republican candidates for Presidency of the second largest producer of CO2 emissions worldwide, are otherwise occupied—with comparisons about each others’ penis size.